The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 4: 1935-37

by Frederick Nebel

  Cardigan hung up, leaned on his elbow for a minute, then shrugged and yanked the covers up to his chin.

  Chapter Two

  The Sign of Murder

  THE house in East Thirty-fifth Street was three-storied, not counting the basement. It had brown sides and a new gray front and the doorway and vestibule were level with the street. In the rear was a courtyard and when Idlemann the janitor put his cat out at six in the morning the sky was clear, the air had a cold, washed rain. Idlemann was a clinker of a man, small and dried up and testy-looking. He had a nut-cracker face—his nose almost met his chin.

  Three ashcans usually stood in a row outside the back door, but this morning one of them was overturned and ashes lay spread on the cement courtyard. Idlemann cursed. He hopped out into the courtyard—and stopped short. There was a man lying on the cement and there was dark color on the paving and the man’s body looked broken, out of joint. Idlemann’s mouth became a gaping O. He turned almost stealthily, crept back through the doorway and bolted up the corridor. He reached Thirty-fifth Street with his eyes bulging.

  “Police!” he screamed.

  Patrolman Carpintero, picking his teeth on the corner of Thirty-fifth and Lexington, heard the bleating sound and turned his eyes absently down the side street. He saw the hopping, arm-fanning figure of Idlemann and proceeded leisurely to meet it, sucking at his cleaned teeth. People were beginning to thrust their heads out of windows.

  “Officer, officer!” panted Idlemann.

  “Hahn?” said Carpintero.

  “A man—a man”—Idlemann pointed toward the house—“is back there dead—dead!”

  Carpintero took a final sharp suck at his teeth, said, “Well, let’s take a look,” and motioned Idlemann to go in. The patrolman followed the janitor to the courtyard, stopped without bending his knees and rolled the body over. “For a minute,” he said, “I thought you was kidding. You wasn’t. This lad hit smack on his puss. Who is he?” Carpintero looked up at the rows of windows.

  The janitor grimaced. “I can’t tell—account of the face—but it looks like Mr. Bourke.”

  “Top floor?”

  “Y-yes, sir.”

  “Well, a top-floor window’s open. Let’s go up.”

  They climbed to the top floor, Idlemann way ahead, the cop taking his time. The janitor was waiting outside a door when Carpintero finally arrived.

  “Locked?” Carpintero asked.

  “Yes—locked.”

  “I could bust it, buddy, unless you got a key.”

  Idlemann took a fat ring of keys from his hip pocket and opened the door. He cringed, not wanting to enter. The cop looked in, then entered and strolled through a living-room, a bedroom containing twin beds, a dining-nook and a kitchen. The kitchen window was the one that was open.

  Carpintero looked out, pulled his head back in and said: “Yop.”

  The shade lay on the floor. It evidently had been yanked off, for one of the brackets was missing. Carpintero took note of it but did not pick it up. He strolled into the living-room, picked up the phone and called his precinct station-house. As he hung up he saw Idlemann standing timidly in the doorway.

  “You c’n come in,” Carpintero said, “but don’t touch nothing.”

  Idlemann’s nose and chin worked toward each other as he gagged out: “Is—is Mrs. Bourke d-dead too?”

  “Ah, so there’s a Mrs. Bourke,” said Carpintero. He made another tour of the apartment, this time looking in all the closets. “Nope. Nobody here.” He sat down and hung his cap on one knee. “Any minute the sergeant’ll be over. Now don’t touch nothing.”

  “Can I sit down?” groaned Idlemann.

  “Sure, pal. Only don’t sit on a chair with arms account of you might touch the arms.”

  AT six-twenty-five Detective-sergeant Grover Block walked in through the door, said, “Hiyuh,” to Carpintero and cruised noisy-heeled through the apartment. He reappeared in the living-room and grunted: “Well, where’s the body?”

  Carpintero said, “Well, it’s down in the courtyard out back there.” And to Block’s partner, Whitey Fife, “The sarge crabs—”

  “You lug-head, what’s the idea of making me climb two flights of stairs when the body’s down in the courtyard?” Block demanded.

  “But this is where it fell out of,” said Carpintero.

  “What the hell do I care where it fell out of! First I want to see a body, then I’ll—”

  “But I thought—”

  “You’re not paid to think! When you’re paid to think you won’t be wearing harness, you’ll be wearing plainclothes! Who are you?” Block chopped at Idlemann.

  Idlemann told him.

  “You stay here,” Block said; and to his partner, “Come on, Whitey.”

  They went out and Carpintero, squinting at the door, took a slow spit into a wastebasket and said: “That f’r you, Sarge.”

  Ten minutes later Block and Whitey returned and Block dumped onto a desk a handful of odds and ends he had taken out of Bourke’s pockets. His voice, always short, blunt, toneless, said: “Keys. Cards. Fountain pen. Pencil. Watch—broken—stopped at twenty minutes past twelve last night. Twenty grand from his pockets. Ten in thousands, nineteen five-hundreds, and nine one-hundred-dollar bills and a hundred bucks in tens. He’s got his topcoat on, so he was either about to leave or he’d just come in when it happened.”

  “Maybe he committed suicide,” suggested Carpintero.

  “There you go again—thinking.” Block slapped the packet of bills across his palm and grunted: “A guy with twenty grand in his pants is going to commit suicide, I suppose.” He dropped the money to the desk. “That,” he added, pointing to the money, “is the sign of murder. I’ll show you another, bright eyes. Come in here.”

  Block strode into the kitchen and pointed to a fireplace poker that lay beneath the sink. “It don’t belong in here, it belongs in the living-room. Open your eyes and you’ll see fresh porcelain chipped off the sink—there’s the bits on the floor.” He picked up the poker between thumb and forefinger, halfway down the shaft. “And there’s a bit of white on the poker.”

  “I don’t see no blood, though.”

  “Wouldn’t have to be. A quick sock on the head don’t always leave blood in a second, dummy. The guy was hit and then whoever hit him threw away the poker, scared. Or maybe the sink was hit by accident.”

  “Maybe Bourke was drunk and slipped and fell out the window.”

  Block flexed his flat hips. “Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

  “Well,” said Carpintero, “once we get hold of his wife—”

  “His wife!”

  “Sure. Idlemann in there says he has a wife, only she ain’t here—she wasn’t when I got here.”

  Block went streaking into the living-room and shot at Idlemann: “When’d you last see Bourke’s wife?”

  “Well—you see—I—I—”

  “Come on, come on—take the marbles out of your mouth.”

  Idlemann belched: “Six o’clock last night.”

  “Where?”

  “Leaving—going out.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t have to ‘sir’ me, mister. ’D you see her come in again?”

  “N-no.”

  “Hear her up here later during the night?”

  “No.”

  “Hear anybody else up here?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear any noise, a crash, at about midnight?”

  Idlemann shook his head, gulped. “No—no.”

  “My God, you sleep down there in the basement and you mean to tell me a guy hits the cement outside and you don’t hear him!”

  “I—I always take sleeping powders.”

  BLOCK groaned and rolled his savage dark eyes. Then he growled: “Well, who else lives in this house? Whitey, go down and see who all lives here and see if they heard anything.”

  Whitey said amiably, “Wait…” and c
rossed the room, shoved aside an armchair. He picked up a loaded suitcase and skated it out into the middle of the room, pointed to the initials on it. “Bourke’s, I guess.”

  Block threw him the bunch of keys, saying, “See.”

  Whitey got it open and dumped the contents. “I guess so. He must have been going to leave for places.”

  “With twenty grand, sure. But why—” He stopped short. “The motive robbery,” he said, pointing rigidly.

  “The wife,” said Whitey.

  Block snapped his fingers. “Hell, yes! He was going to leave her. She caught him—came home late and caught him and—”

  “I’ll go down and ask people questions, like you said,” Whitey drawled, leaving.

  The phone rang and Block crossed to it, picked it up and stared solemnly straight ahead at nothing. “Hello,” he muttered.

  “Oh, Steve, there,” a man’s voice said. “Golly, I guess I just about caught you. Listen, Steve. When you get there, look up Ben Rossberger right away and tell him I’ll give him two hundred a week to run the Bandstand. You know how all the people there’s been asking where’s Ben, where’s Ben. I think he’s worth two hundred, so tell him.”

  “Who is this?” Block growled.

  “It’s me, Steve. It’s Gus.”

  “Gus who?”

  “Hey… who is this?”

  “You’re talking to Detective-sergeant Grover Block.”

  “Oh, well. Well, put Steve on.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What!”

  “Come on, who are you?”

  “Who am I? Damn it, I’m Gus Poteska!”

  “Well, I never met you, Mr. Poteska, but I’m going to. Put your pants on and come down here.”

  “Hey, listen! Wait!”

  “Put ’em on and come down, Mr. Poteska.”

  Block hung up and found Carpintero smiling smugly at him. Carpintero was holding up something. “Here’s something you didn’t find, Sarge.”

  Block crossed the room, plucked a ladies’ diamond ring from between Carpintero’s thumb and index finger. “Looks like an engagement ring,” he muttered.

  “It is, I guess. Take a look inside the band there.”

  Block looked. Finely engraved were the words From Stephen to Ivy.

  “What’s his wife’s name?” Block asked Idlemann.

  “Ivy,” said Idlemann.

  “Where’d you find it?” Block said to the patrolman.

  “Under the gas range in the kitchen.”

  Block stepped to the bedroom door, stood there for a moment. Turning, he headed for the telephone saying: “Neither bed slept in.” He picked up the phone and did some official business. “Yeah,” he said, toward the end, picking up a photograph of Ivy Bourke, “I got one of her. Oh, hell, we ought to pick her up in no time, unless she chucks herself in the river.”

  He cradled the receiver and set down the instrument as the newspapermen arrived.

  AUGUSTINE POTESKA was about five-feet-two. He was cone-shaped, his small pointed shoes being the point of the cone. He had small white chunky hands and a white square head, bald on top, with a small patch of black hair slicked above either ear. His lips were thick, red, with definite lines. His nose was small, pointed. He had wide-open large blue eyes, full of nothing. He was supposed to be worth plenty of money. His clothes were expensive, dark and snug. He sat on a straight-backed chair in the Bourke living-room, his toes barely touching the floor, his chunky little hands folded on his paunch.

  Block was ripping out in his blunt, hard voice: “I don’t give a stinking damn who you are! Twenty thousand bucks is twenty thousand bucks. You want it. You want it because you say it’s yours, you say you gave it to Bourke to fly south this morning to the Meadowforth Track. You wanted him to bet it for you right at the track. Now that he’s dead you want the money so you can send it down with somebody else. The hell you say! How do I know it’s your money? Suppose it is? All right, we’ll say it is. But it’s got to stay impounded till we prove it.”

  Poteska said in a chilly smiling voice: “You ain’t ever worked up in my territory, have you, Block?”

  “No. So what?”

  “I don’t take guff from flatfoots.”

  Block’s face was wooden, narrow. “I talk plain, brother, and if you can’t take plain talk to hell with you. I said to hell with you and what are you going to do about it?”

  Cardigan appeared in the doorway and said: “Kick him in the teeth, Gus, and see if they’re false.”

  Block turned. “I thought I phoned you an hour ago to get over here. How long does it take you to get five blocks?”

  “I ate breakfast.”

  “This is more important than breakfast, damn you!”

  “Not my breakfast.”

  “Hello, Jack,” said Whitey.

  “Hello, Whitey,” said Cardigan. “If your partner gets wound up anymore he’s going to spin like a top.”

  Block snapped: “I’ve heard funnier jokes than that at funerals, sailor. But when I phone you and tell you—”

  “To hell with you, Grover!” Cardigan snapped back at him. “You’re not my boss and if I want to eat any breakfast before I come around I’ll eat it. Just because Gus Poteska gets you riled is no reason why you should land on me—so don’t try it. One more beef out of you and I’ll turn around and walk out. What time was Bourke killed?”

  “Exactly twenty past twelve last night, loud-mouth.”

  Cardigan leaned back against the wall, pulled down one side of his heavy mouth in a smile, said: “Where do I fit in and who was the guy with the stop-watch that clocked the exact time?”

  Block pointed to the desk. “There’s his watch—smashed—at twenty past twelve. I took it out of his pocket down in the courtyard.”

  “All right. Now tell we where I fit in, Toots.”

  Block’s face looked very narrow, very watchful. “I been checking up on the phone here. There was a call made from here to your place at five past one—exactly forty-five minutes after Bourke’s watch stopped.”

  Cardigan’s eyes were not fooling now. “My phone rang about that time, Grove. But there was nobody on it.”

  “I’ll give you a couple more answers, Jack.”

  “You got the right one. Ask Oscar at the agency office. I hung up and then after a few minutes I thought it might be the office, so I phoned Oscar. He said no, it wasn’t him.”

  Block wore a sad wooden half-smile. “Nice work, Jack. Nice figuring.”

  Cardigan said: “All right, then. You make up the puzzles, so you give your own answers. Listen, everybody. This is going to be good.”

  BLOCK was unimpressed. “Bourke’s watch stopped—he was killed at twelve-twenty. A call is made from here to your apartment at five past one. Bourke’s wife used to be Ivy Trant and when she was Ivy Trant she worked in your office. The answer is this: she took a crack at her husband with a poker, stunned him, and he pitched out the window. She didn’t know what to do. Then she thought of you. She phoned you.”

  “And I told her to run away. That would be just about the brightest thing in the world for me to do.”

  Block said: “She phoned you at five past one this morning. Bourke couldn’t have phoned you because—”

  “Because he was dead. He was dead at five past one because his watch—smashed—showed he died at twenty past twelve. Now how would you like me to tell you that this twenty-past-twelve theory of yours might be cockeyed?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You say he was hit with a poker. All right—if somebody comes after you with a poker you’re going to defend yourself—you’re going to hold up your arms. The watch might have been smashed by the poker and not by the fall.”

  “He’s right there,” drawled Whitey.

  Block flexed his lips. “O.K. One of us is as right as the other on that—except for the reasoning. From what I heard from some reporters that were around here a little while ago, Jack, you and Bourke were not on speaking terms. So why
should Bourke call you up?”

  “I didn’t say he did.”

  “I know you didn’t. I said his wife called you up for advice after she smacked him with the poker. It’s got to be that way!” he growled. “Robbery wasn’t the motive. He was leaving her and she fought with him. Her engagement ring was found on the kitchen floor. Maybe she flung it at him, I don’t know. But there you are. With twenty thousand on the body—”

  Cardigan darkened. “What twenty thousand?”

  Block told him and Cardigan looked at Gus Poteska.

  The door opened and a tall, handsome brunette swaggered in, took a bored look around the room and said to Poteska: “Well, I got here, Gus.”

  Block snapped: “Who are you?”

  The brunette looked him up and down casually. “I might ask, what are you? I might, cowboy, but I won’t. There may be children present.”

  “Now, Gloria,” soothed Poteska. “Be nice. Sergeant Block, this is Gloria Bell, my secretary.”

  Gloria chuckled. “That’s Gus all over, Sarge. He always calls his girl friend his secretary, just in case the vice squad’s around.”

  “Young lady,” said Block bluntly, “if this is a rehearsal you’re putting on, pass over it. There’s a murder quiz going on here and we don’t need any stooges. We got one here already,” he added, digging his dark stare at Cardigan, “and we don’t need any more.”

  “Hello, big boy and whatever your name is,” she said to Cardigan.

  Cardigan said: “Hi, beautiful.”

  She sauntered across the room, helped herself to a cigarette from a box on the table.

  “Madam,” said Block, “I wish you’d get out of here, unless you got business here.”

  She picked up the poker, which was lying on the table, and pointed it at him. “Sarge, control yourself—”

  “Damn it, drop that! That was a weapon—”

  “Oh-h,” she said, letting go of it as though it were hot. “Little Gloria pulling boners again.” She raised a hand. “Hold it, Sarge. I just dropped by because Gus asked me to.”

  Poteska nodded. “Yes. Gloria was present when I gave Steve the twenty thousand dollars. She is my witness. I asked her to come.”

  Block looked at her. “Is that right?” he demanded.

  She touched her hair languidly. “Gus took the words right out of my mouth.”